Gary
Webb, former investigative reporter at the San Jose Mercury News,
passed
away December 10, an apparent suicide. mourns
his passing. In
1996 Webb broke a story detailing how CIA and DEA “assets” used cocaine shipments
that ended up on the streets of black Los Angeles to fund the Reagan administration's
mercenary armies in Nicaragua.

That the Reagan and elder Bush administrations financed their murderous proxy
war in Central America in part with drug money after Congress cut off official
funding was old news. Charles Rangel (D-NY) and John Kerry (D-MA) chaired
House and Senate subcommittees, respectively, in the late 80s which uncovered
ties between drug rings and the sharp knives of US foreign policy in the region. It
was one sordid corner of the global web of arms trafficking and official criminality
called Iran–contra. Rangel and Kerry called for further and deeper investigations,
and both were shut down by their fellow lawmakers. The establishment
press, so-called watchdogs of democracy, distorted Rangel’s and Kerry’s statements,
ridiculed their allegations, and refused to examine their evidence or conduct
probes of their own, effectively killing the story.

But in 1996, after a year's investigation, Gary Webb was the right man at
the right place and time. The Mercury News was one of the first to put
its content on the brand new world wide web. Webb convinced his editor
to include significant amounts of his source material including court transcripts,
audio clips, photos and more on the paper's web site. This time the story
could not be contained. Between talk radio, especially black talk radio,
and the web the story of how government-sanctioned operatives with immunity
from prosecution played key roles in sparking the crack epidemic of the 80s
achieved breakout dimensions. The Mercury News web site logged more than
1.2 million hits a day and the story was widely reprinted, quoted, distributed
and discussed, especially in black communities across America, where popular
outrage was immediate, incandescent and overwhelming. Black pastors,
politicians and civic leaders and ordinary citizens demanded answers and action
from an establishment prepared to give neither.

Gary Webb was attacked and viciously smeared in the mainstream media from
the time the article appeared to his Los Angeles Times obituary last month. His
editors cravenly apologized and took the story off their Website.
By 1998, Webb combined new research with material that couldn't be used in
the original series and authored Dark
Alliance: The CIA, Contras, and the Crack Explosion, but his career
as a reporter was over. Fired from the Mercury News and blackballed from
employment at any newspaper, Gary Webb’s life began the downward spiral that
ended in his suicide last month.

But with the story having assumed a life of its own, discrediting its messenger
would not be nearly enough. Hiding, losing, fibbing about and classifying
bits of incriminating data were not enough, either. Some way had to be
found to render the story illegitimate on its face – at least in white America – regardless
of its mountain of damning facts, despite its constellations of interconnected
dots. To fulfill this need on the part of our nation’s ruling elite,
a brand new, allegedly widespread and ethnically specific psychiatric disorder
was invented. It was called “black paranoia.”

Thus a flood of media pundits, white opinion leaders, editorial page writers
and scholars-for-hire rushed forth to comfort white America with the news that
their black neighbors, practically all African Americans, suffer from a peculiar
case of chronic mass paranoia. A gargantuan, racist lie was deployed
to swallow and conceal the truths that Gary Webb had labored so diligently
to bring to light. “Black paranoia” was a very useful diagnosis, tailor-made
to convince the white public that further examinations of the CIA connection
to crack cocaine were pointless.

More than eight years after Gary Webb’s courageous reporting, millions of
outraged citizens demand probes into exit poll manipulations, selective purges
of voter lists, widespread vote fraud and ubiquitous voter suppression efforts
in the minority communities of battleground states during the recent presidential
election. We should expect to see complainants mislabeled as “conspiracy
theorists” – as if it were remarkable or unusual that Republicans cooperate
in the furtherance of criminal acts. Tens or hundreds of thousands are
serving time in US prisons for “conspiracy” of one kind or another, so it can’t
be that rare or that difficult to prove. But when all else fails, predicts
that editorial pages, lazy scholars, media pundits and dittoheads everywhere
will trot out their favorite race-specific psychiatric disorder to explain
why the mere facts are not worth looking at. We will be told that “black paranoia” is
the culprit, as if African Americans have not been denied their voting rights
in recent decades through any number of ostensibly race-neutral mechanisms
from California to Connecticut.

In fact, what the pundits call “black paranoia” is really what the Black
Consensus looks like from inside the bubble of white American racism. Metaphors
are dangerous, but bubbles are usually delicate and fragile things. An
immense weight of lies and denial are already pressing down on the bubble
of white racism and the load is about to get heavier. While African
Americans and the rest of humanity outside the bubble are always hoping,
praying and working for its collapse, we know not to count on it any time
soon. And we know that even paranoiacs have some real enemies.